Tuesday, July 01, 2014

I was interviewed recently by Julie Tomlin for Digital Women UK about my online journey. You can go straight to the interview here. It was interesting - and fun - to look back over the almost-ten-years since this blog first emerged, blinking in the blinding light of cyberspace, in Jan 2006. And you know what conclusion I came to when I looked back over this journey? This is a great time to be alive. The contacts I've made online with people who enrich my life in so many ways - people I would never have met if we lived in a different time - are part of a phenomenon unique to our generation.

When my Teen1 went to Cambodia and Goa earlier this year, I saw photos of sights at the same time as he saw them or soon after. In the Cambodian evenings and UK mornings, we would chat about how he was doing as a volunteer at Anjali House. Sometimes we'd be popping in and out of chats over an hour or so. (Didn't happen when he was in Goa, where he was with friends, but that was OK too.) Compare that to when I was in Grenada and my parents relied on the occasional hand-written letter or a rare phone call when I could make it to the Cable & Wireless office in the capital.

These days, this blog is pretty dormant. I gave up thinking I had to post regularly and took the pressure off, posting only when I have something to say that wouldn't fit into a tweet or FB status. Since I'm doing a review of my online journey, I just checked my stats for the first time in I don't know how long. 93,197 people have visited this blog and there have been 151,920 page views. That's a lorra lorra clicks.

While I'm here, I thought I'd do a quick round up of what I'm up to. I'm currently hosting the 12th 6-week online self-edit course together with Emma Darwin. Emma and I knew each other for about 6 months online before we worked out that we lived a few doors away from each other. The vast majority of my editing work comes to me online, either through my website or via Writers' Workshop. I recently ran a workshop for the delightful Chiltern Writers' Group who approached me online. The Festival of Writing in York sells all its places online. I have another workshop lined up in October for Verulam Writers' Circle who found me online. Also in October, I will be running workshops and Book Doctor sessions at a retreat in a 12th century monastery run by The Place to Write. The same people have asked me to do the same sort of thing at a different retreat in January 2015. Needless to say, this came via online contacts. I'm currently forming links between Stories for Homes and Journey to Justice. The latter is particularly interesting in this context because the project's aim is to build on the civil rights movement and other historical struggles to tackle injustice today. Just look at what we can do in terms of mobilisation now that was not available just a couple of decades ago.

Wonder what this will all look like in ten years time. Yes. This is a good time to be alive.